


Henry, Miller, and Wilde

by prettyfaroutman



Category: Kissing in the Rain (Web Series)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-24 01:57:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2564021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettyfaroutman/pseuds/prettyfaroutman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>* I know other people’s headcanons are that this episode was a screentest for Syntax, and Audrey didn’t get the part, but my headcanon is that this is a completely different movie that was inspired by the success of Syntax, and that they got permission to lift Lenore’s character from ATTV because she was so popular.</p></blockquote>





	Henry, Miller, and Wilde

When Henry was a senior in high school, his English class had studied _The Crucible_. He distinctly remembered the group project they had done, where each group had minimally staged and performed one of the acts of the play for the rest of the class. His group had cast him as Giles Corey; although he was in the drama club and had more acting experience than anyone else in the group at the time, adolescent charisma had won the day and Jeff Hellerman, football star and future prom king, was chosen to play John Proctor.

Henry hadn’t much cared that his peers passed over him for the lead role. Most of the other group members seemed to be there only for the grade, which meant the acting experience was far less fun and challenging than his drama club roles. There were a few in the group who took the project seriously, including Sarita Velasquez, who was also in the drama club and who played a wonderful Elizabeth Proctor, but there was no getting around the fact that it just felt like an assignment. And while Henry was a respectable enough student, he needed more than just the looming weight of a grade to invest in a role.

Not to mention the fact that he wasn’t even that big a fan of Arthur Miller. He understood that Miller was a giant in the field of American playwrights, and he certainly respected the craft of the writing. It’s just that highly wrought tragedy wasn’t really to his taste. For him, the relief of catharsis didn’t outweigh the burden of sadness. Life was difficult enough already, so why not use your art to lighten the load a bit?

Which was why he was thrilled that, during the same semester when he slogged through _The Crucible_ , he was cast as Algernon in the drama club’s production of _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Wilde was just about as far from Miller as one could get and still remain within the same medium, and that was precisely what a teenage Henry had wanted. Algernon allowed him to be saucy, witty, and dashing - all the things that he wished he could be in real life, but that didn’t quite fit his unassuming demeanor and awkward adolescent frame without the period costume and the meticulously scripted one-liners.

The only thing that would have made him happier is if Sarita had been cast as Cecily, so he could have wooed her with Algernon’s Victorian irony. Instead, she played Gwendolen, Algernon’s young cousin. He could only hope that when Algernon told Cecily that she seemed “to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection,” Sarita noticed that Henry had obliquely, telepathically directed the line to her in the wings.

On later reflection, he realized that it was probably better for everyone that Sarita hadn’t played his love interest. His kiss with Madison Graves’ Cecily had been, predictably, just as awkward as Henry himself was, which meant spending more time than was comfortable workshopping the kiss in front of the rest of the cast and crew. Kissing Madison repeatedly with Ms. Le Fleur shouting instructions from the house and certain immature cast members giggling in the wings was bad enough; if it had been Sarita, he might well have burst into flame from the embarrassment.

***

All of these memories flooded back to him as he read the script for _The Haunting of Salem_.* Henry himself was still in many ways the same blundering boy of the misdirected displays of adolescent affection (though thankfully puberty had pulled through for him on the body issues). But when acting, he now had enough experience to be more comfortable as a leading man, especially when the role was written to be assertive and commanding as this one was. This John Proctor had the same upright integrity as Miller’s character, but in death he was released from the bounds of some of the more restrictive Puritan ideals, which allowed him to embody (haha) the kind of confident swagger of an Algernon. Henry loved having the opportunity to release his inner Algernon, as he still called that part of himself.

Plus, the script was funny as hell. Not in the way that Wilde is funny, but in the way that that webseries was funny, the one that Audrey was in. The one that Audrey created. When his agent had told him it was likely that she would reprise her role as Lenore in _Haunting_ , he had felt his stomach flip over. On watching “A Tell-Tale Vlog” after loving _Syntax_ , his overwhelming feeling was that the _Syntax ___producers had made a horrible mistake in cutting Lenore, and Audrey, out of the film. So seeing that Lenore had been brought to life (haha) again, and that Audrey was likely to be involved, made him optimistic about the project.

But it also brought more than his typical level of anxiety to the audition process. His agent had warned him ahead of time that he would be doing chemistry reads with prospective Lenores, which he knew really just meant Audrey. So the night before the audition, he found himself lying awake, thinking back to his admiration of Sarita from afar and his instant attraction to Audrey as Lenore. Wondering if Algernon or John Proctor could help him talk to her, or whether bashful Henry would trip up his tongue. Wondering whether there would even be an opportunity to talk to her outside of the audition itself.

The clock had passed 3am when he finally lulled himself to sleep, repeating the mantra, “Don’t freak out.”

**Author's Note:**

> * I know other people’s headcanons are that this episode was a screentest for Syntax, and Audrey didn’t get the part, but my headcanon is that this is a completely different movie that was inspired by the success of Syntax, and that they got permission to lift Lenore’s character from ATTV because she was so popular.


End file.
